In these first few frenzied weeks of 2018, as citizens hurtled toward Saturday’s one-year anniversary of the inauguration of Donald Trump, the president seemed to call for the incarceration of political opponents, engaged on Twitter with Kim Jong Un about the size of his “Nuclear Button,” lashed out at a scathing book by stressing that he was, “like, really smart,” as well as a “very stable genius,” and insisted he isn’t racist after privately using either “shithole” or “shithouse” to describe countries populated primarily by black people. It’s cycles like these that make many—even some supporters—wish Trump would talk less, maybe not at all, if only every once in a while.

But in the midst of this latest bout of chaotic, exhausting, disorienting noise, Trump and his White House also released a 3½-minute recap video, called “Year One,” a fast-paced flip book of sorts, heavily reliant on pictures of military equipment, soldiers, law enforcement officers, photo-op hurricane response, Christmas trees and American flags—and many shots, of course, of Trump himself. In sum, it is a particularly Trumpian version of standard political public relations—its production style is less documentary and more movie-trailer or advertorial. And while the video elicited a mere fraction of the attention generated by his gauche, profane outbursts, it is no less important a piece of data in any ongoing study of Trump.

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Because to fixate on what he says and the frequency and intensity with which he says it is to misunderstand the man, how he thinks, and the actual engine of his appeal. If Trump was in many respects uniquely unprepared for the office to which he was elected, there is one important area in which he was uncommonly well-suited: As undisciplined as he can be about what he says, Trump is equally assiduous about how he looks. Whereas his predecessor was a constitutional law professor who thought about making linear arguments for policy, Trump is a habitual television watcher who thinks more in terms of building indelible imagery. And he has been building his visual record with a clarity of purpose that bears no resemblance to his scatter-shot policy initiatives.

Dark suit, red hat, thumbs up, Trump possesses “weapons-grade persuasion skills,” says Scott Adams, creator of the comic strip Dilbert and the author of Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter—and the best way to persuade is through the militantly diligent use of consistent visuals. Trump has talked for decades about “central casting” and “the look,” his own and that of others, and he’s a president who reportedly has urged aides to view each day of his administration as an episode of a television series. This, Adams told me, is this president’s distinguishing, master-class skill. “He reads the public. Nobody’s done it better. Why? Because he’s watching what the public is watching.”

“I think he’s always understood it,” longtime Trump political adviser Roger Stone said this week in an interview. “That how you look is more important than how you sound. How you come across is more important than the words you use.”

“And he understands the power of simplicity and directness and setting a stage for people,” former House Speaker and Trump ally Newt Gingrich added.

Hillary Clinton is a reader, and Donald Trump is a watcher, and that’s a big reason he won and she lost in 2016, Trump biographer Gwenda Blair told me earlier this year. When we talked again the other day, she said nothing that has happened since has changed her mind. “The words don’t matter anymore. The pictures matter,” said Blair, who also wrote Almost Golden: Jessica Savitch and the Selling of Television News. “Print media doesn’t really matter. It’s the screen.”

NBC’s Katy Tur wrote in her book about the first time she interviewed Trump; before they started, he wanted to see how he looked in the monitor. “Let me just see,” he said. “Spin it.” Meet the Press host Chuck Todd has had similar experiences. “Every time I interviewed him in person, and we’d always pre-tape, he always wanted to look at it after—not with sound,” Todd told me. “The last interview I had with him, it felt like he watched—it wasn’t the whole thing, because it was a 30-minute interview—but it felt like he watched a good 10 minutes of it. On mute.”

All of this made me want to try to see Trump the way Trump sees himself. To rewatch the way he rewatches. So I turned the sound off. And I hit play on key pieces of the first 12 months of President Trump.

***

The rallies were the logical place to start. After all, “Trump’s campaign was centered around a ‘set piece rally,’” Stone wrote in his recent book about Trump. From Phoenix in July 2015 to Mobile, Alabama, the month after that to Dallas that fall and all the way through to Grand Rapids, Michigan, in the wee hours of November 8, 2016, Trump’s rallies were his fuel—an utterly ordinary optic for any politician of significance but undeniably more overtly central to Trump’s political persona. With no sound, the eye zeroes in on his unique consistency of imagery—his more aggressive, space-taking pose; his expressive, gold-orange face; his lectern-gripping, air-chopping, point-making hands; the resolute red, white and blue palette of his suit, shirts and ties, set against a reflexively familiar backdrop of practically stock-footage devotees holding signs and wearing hats. But those rock-ribbed Trump fans come across as not just tacitly acknowledged props but energy-adding parts of the show. And Trump appears as if he’s not only giving a speech but railing away. The most critical characteristic is not the spoken content so much as the discernible buzz through the screen. And the rallies haven’t stopped. And they haven’t changed. Melbourne, Florida; Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Huntington, West Virginia; Pensacola, Florida; back to Phoenix—the only immediately visible feature that’s been markedly different over this past year is the placard in front of him that’s gone from five blunt letters to the round, regal seal.

Trump’s signing ceremonies, for executive orders or legislation, meanwhile, are the moving-picture versions of the Oval Office grin-and-clicks, sometimes with thumbs up, sometimes without. But Trump is “a star in every one,” as presidential historian Douglas Brinkley told POLITICO last summer. Trump, same as past presidents, is in the middle of the frame, the only one seated, a shiny, uncluttered desk, surrounded by lawmakers who are standing, occasionally awkwardly, even deferentially. With his often more extended, body-twisting banter, though, Trump stokes some suspense while turning the lawmakers—stripped in such an image of context or consequence—into something like Hollywood-set extras no different than the lawmakers behind him after the House health care vote in May or the lawmakers behind him after the tax cut vote in December (which earned a spot in “Year One”). Most importantly, Trump’s flourish from the get-go in these ceremonies was a move that quickly became a trademark—the theatrical, side-to-side display of his thick, dark inimitable signature, managing to give a requisite, mostly static scene from any modern presidency a more kinetic, compelling “look” all his own.

But what has become perhaps the most useful regular image for Trump over the course of his first year as president is his boardroom-style meetings at the White House. That’s because it’s the one most reminiscent of The Apprentice. There are many reasons Trump is now the president, but The Apprentice is on the short list. The private-sector capstone to his hyperpublic life was ultimately his bright-lights bridge to the West Wing. And in these Cabinet Room meetings, it hardly matters whether he’s with members of his Cabinet, Republican legislators, Democratic legislators or some combination. And it doesn’t matter what they’re saying, and it doesn’t matter what he is saying, either. It all looks the way he wants it to look on America’s digital wallpaper, on the televisions at the gym or above the bar or on the walls of oil-change waiting rooms or at the gas pump or the phones in everyone’s hands. The meetings let him be in charge. They let him bask in praise. They show him sitting up straight, crossing his arms, attempting to convey with his stern face a no-nonsense strength.

Watch these meetings on mute, though, and something else emerges: Trump sits in a chair that is perceptibly taller than all the others—just like in The Apprentice. “If you think about the presentation on The Apprentice,” Stone told me, “he’s always perfectly coiffed, his makeup is perfect, he’s in the high-backed chair, he’s acting decisively—the way you want a president to act. Now, I understand the elites will say, ‘Oh, that’s just a reality-TV show.’ Not to the average people. They don’t make a distinction between news and entertainment—it’s all television to them—and that’s where they get their impression of Trump.” Last week, then, in the agitated wake of the release of the bombshell book by Michael Wolff that painted the president as all but incompetent and incoherent, Trump let the cameras roll for 55 minutes. Unscripted, because the words didn’t matter as much as the images. The meeting, The Apprentice—same essential aim. “An hourlong ad for the Trumpster,” Stone said.

“He starts as a marketer,” Gingrich added, “and as a guy who understands reaching retail audiences, and a guy who understands putting on for 14 years a top-rated TV show.”

“Straight out of The Apprentice,” former Trump casino executive Jack O’Donnell told me this week when I asked him about the Cabinet Room meetings.

To be sure, Trump has committed his share of visual gaffes—the touching of that odd glowing orb in Saudi Arabia, the fouled-up group handshake with Asian leaders, the bizarre, basketball-style shooting of power towels to Puerto Rican storm victims. On the whole, though, the image-oriented work has been one of the most disciplined facets of Trump’s presidency to this point. This includes what he’s careful not to show as much—pictures, for instance, of him golfing, which over time could be more damaging than the fact-checked written record of the reality that he golfsfar more than Barack Obama did.

“He’s got a knack for that,” former Trump Organization executive Barbara Res said of Trump’s emphasis on visuals. “He has an instinct.”

But he has studied it, too, for much of his life.

Like his formal, fastidious father, who wore suits on evenings and weekends at home and on trips to the beach, Trump dutifully donned a coat and a tie even as boy, aware already of the value to a businessman of burnishing his brand. As a teenager, at New York Military Academy, he was removed early in the fall of his senior year from his role as captain of his company—but nonetheless led a NYMA procession down Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue in a Columbus Day parade. “I was always good at that school,” Trump said to a reporter from the Washington Post for a story two years ago about this contentious, hushed-up episode from his formative military school upbringing. “Take a look at the pictures.” White gloves, pressed uniform, out front—a leader. “Behind that was a failed cadet officer,” fellow NYMA graduate Sandy McIntosh, who knew Trump at home, too, because their families both had memberships at the Atlantic Beach Club, told me. “But he saw those openings. He knew his talent was to look good.” To look the part. The “image-obsessed” Trump hired an ex-cop bodyguard to drive a limousine with “DJT” vanity plates before he had so much as put his name on an edifice or even renovated a hotel.

This particular focus also extended, of course, to his active, long-running interest and involvement in politics, an arena in which he from early on was every bit as much an insider as he was an outsider.

All the way back in 1979, when Trump met Stone through Roy Cohn, Trump said he was intrigued by the presidential candidate Stone was working for at the time. “Reagan’s got the look,” he told Stone, as Stone recalls in his book. “Some guys have the look. Sinatra. JFK. And your man, Reagan.”

“He was also very handsome,” Stone told me. “He was very efficient, very capable, and Trump liked him. He did a great job. When we got to the airport to leave town, he said, ‘That was really great, everything went great, you guys did a great job.’ He shook hands with everybody. As soon as he got out of that plane, he said, ‘Fire that guy.’ And I said, ‘Why? I thought you said he did a great job.’ He said, ‘He did do a great job—but he’s taller than me.’”

And not quite 27 years after that, Trump arrived at the peach-marble base of Trump Tower to announce that he finally was running for president for real. “So he forced the networks to cover him standing next to his supermodel wife, slowly descending the escalator into the ornate lobby of a building that had his name on it,” Gingrich wrote in his book Understanding Trump. “Think about the image of success this visual conveyed to most Americans.” He added: “Visuals matter more than words. Style matters more than convention. The overall impression matters more than the details.”

“I think I look real good,” Trump said in April of 2016, during a rally in Hagerstown, Maryland, as he began to close in on the GOP nomination. “I mean, I think I look like a president.”

“Do I look like a president?” he said the next day, at another rally, in West Chester, Pennsylvania. “How handsome am I, right? How handsome?”

The last week of that September, heading into the first presidential debate, Trump called Stone.

“I was waiting for some 50 questions,” Stone said, “and he said, ‘I got only one question.’ And I said, ‘OK, what is it?’ And he said, ‘What color tie, red or blue?’”